THE RITUAL IS COMPLETE! Black Heaven is finished and released to backers! Thanks to our 300+ backers and over $13,000 raised, we have brought this project to life!
Right now, the plan is to keep the game exclusive to Kickstarter backers for about 3 months, then release the game on Steam and Itch.io. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates!
Here are some screenshots and image assets from the complete game:
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
After almost two years of development, Black Heaven is nearly ready for release to Kickstarter backers! Here’s a summary of what’s coming:
The game has reached almost 400,000 words (including the separate romance routes), which is more than the combined wordcount of Fellowship of the Ring and Dune!
Linnea Kataja has created dozens of beautiful sprite artworks, including costume changes, expressions, and terrifying horror forms!
The game features 50+ backgrounds commissioned from Lim Chin Yang, and each one has been as stunning as the last.
Marek Domagala has been tirelessly working to compose, revise, and sharpen the game’s tracks, which include over 15 unique songs and roughly 45 Fractal Madness versions of those songs–three for each track.
The Seeker mini-game has been completed, and some of the private playtesters have already called it “addicting” and “fun”!
Here are some screenshots of what the game looks like so far:
We’ve also created a fun, free personality quiz that matches you with one of the characters–try it out here!
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
The official launch date is set for April 30th, 2021! You can see the full announcement on Itch!
Here’s an excerpt:
“When I started work on Black Heaven, a game about romancing ghosts in the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague, I didn’t expect a real-life pandemic to spread across the world. Now, the themes of isolation, loneliness, nostalgia, and longing for human connection have become a lot of people’s day-to-day experience. It’s pretty surreal.
“This is a game about ghosts, memories, and rapidly unraveling sanity, so one of the key features will be “Fractal Madness”: if a player tries to repeatedly reload a save file to change their actions, the narrative may be altered in unexpected and disturbing ways. Did reality change, or were your memories wrong?
“Apart from that, Black Heaven is meant to be a deep dive into the dark corners of the human heart that are too terrifying, painful, and universal to ignore. It’s an exploration of the darker side of love, as well as what it means to be human.”
Follow us on Itch to get notified when the Kickstarter is live, follow us on Twitter for updates, and sign up for our email list to get super-early access to stuff!
We’ve also created a fun, free personality quiz that matches you with one of the characters–try it out here!
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
After eight months of work, including creating a Game Design Doc, learning Ren’Py, writing the opening 20 minutes of the game, and finding artists…the demo for Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim is done.
I’ve gotten almost universally positive responses for the Beta version of the demo, and now I’m super excited to send it out into the world. From the art to the music, I’m super stoked about everything in it!
I’ll be doing promotion and PR outreach for the demo in the coming weeks, including hopefully showcasing it at PlayNYC this year.
In the meantime, thanks to everyone who collaborated with me on this project:
You can play the demo on itch.io here!
Stay tuned for more updates!
— Chris Mahon, Creative Lead
To help aid in art design for the game, I created some Pinterest boards for characters and costumes! You can check out some of the key reference images below.
Note: these images are not official art for the game–they’re just inspirations.
One of the key sketches of No-Eyes, the necromantic antagonist of the game. He wears a black, eyeless helmet with human teeth embedded in the jaw.
Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes with high collar and silver buttons, smooth, eyeless helmet, leather satchel, white gloves, no exposed skin, 6’0, emaciated
Occupation: Necromancer and scholar
Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, charismatic, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends. His humorous and often devil-may-care attitude is carefully cultivated to disguise his true intentions.
Ru is one of the three main romance interests. She is the main character’s tutor.
Key Appearance Traits: Medium-length blue hair and bangs, large glasses, willowy, 5’10
Occupation: Scholar/teacher (Physical regeneration specialty)
Personality: Ru is shy and bookish, but her passionate side shines through when tackling a puzzle or difficult problem. She’s widely recognized as a leader in her field, but her relentless work ethic has isolated her and made her even less comfortable interacting with people.
Keywords:Gentle, empathetic, obsessive, anxious
Leathe is one of the key romance interests. She is a skilled surgeon and one of the protagonist’s classmates.
Key Appearance Traits: medium-length, red, curly hair tied up in a messy bun, freckles, roughly 5’8
Occupation: Student (Artificial vessel specialty)
Personality: Leathe is charming, clever, and an unapologetic queen of drama. She loves to gossip and play with people’s hearts, and can appear callous and shallow. However, her outward persona is mostly a façade, which hides her deep insecurities and her wariness to trust others.
Key words: shrewd, witty, manipulative, flirtatious
Izagi is one of the key romance interests. She is a martial artist and one of the protagonist’s classmates.
Key Appearance Traits: long, straight black hair, fit and toned, 6’0
Occupation: Student (Physical augmentation specialty)
Personality: Izagi Ito is focused, disciplined, and confident, but beneath the surface, she’s still struggling to rein in her chaotic emotions, which range from fierce competitiveness to anger over her past. For her, martial arts are a way to tame her own mind.
Key words: fierce, confident, disciplined
Big announcement: I’m planning on turning “Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim” into a full-length, commercial visual novel!
Though the project likely won’t kick into gear until Fall 2020, I’m laying the groundwork for the game now, including 1) an early version of the demo with placeholders, 2) marketing plans, and 3) an outline for the full game!
Here’s the working description of the game:
In Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim, you must collect three ghosts in a magical grimoire and return them to a mysterious necromancer named No-Eyes, who offers to bind one of them to you forever. The journey will take you into the depths of this ruined world as well as the memories of each of the ghosts you meet, but you can only give your heart to one of them. Who will you choose?
- Ru, the shy, brilliant scholar?
- Leathe, the fiery, sharp-witted conwoman?
- Ryu-Ito, the fierce but kind-hearted martial artist?
Be careful—in this world, ghosts can take on many forms, from beautiful shades to Lovecraftian horrors, so you’ll need to use your kindness and cunning to survive!
The game is meant to be in the dark fantasy/horror genre, and is planned to have some 18+ material, including romance scenes and some Silent Hill-style horror imagery.
Right now, here are some of the planned key features of game:
One of the gameplay elements I’m super excited about is a feature in Ren’Py that allows the game to remember certain player decisions, even if they don’t save the game, exit, and reload a previous save.
This ties is nicely with one of the key narrative elements–chronomancy, or time magic. The player character is given the ability to go back in time and change their actions (manifested as the player reloading a save), but when they do, some characters will remember the unsaved “alternate” timeline.
Since two of the key themes are memories and blurring of reality, this opens up a lot of possibilities for weird, maddening things to happen to the PC.
When I first posted about “Black Heaven” several months ago, he project was only planned to be a portfolio piece, something to demonstrate my narrative design and team management skills.
After starting work for the Loresmyth and Tales in September, I shelved “Black Heaven” to focus on my professional work, which included writing and coding the pilot for a novel-length interactive fiction series.
Once my schedule stabilized a bit and I finished up the pilot for Tales, I decided to keep working on “Black Heaven” in my free time. I felt like I really had something special, and my work with Tales had served as a crash course in writing and coding interactive fiction.
After a few weeks of thinking and researching, I decided that once my writing commitment to Tales was finished, I’d try to make “Black Heaven” into a full-length commercial game.
The current development and release plan looks like this:
Right now, the estimated budget of the game is between $1,800- $2,000 and the retail price is planned to be around $7.99, though these figures may change.
I’m not planning on making any money from the Kickstarter to keep the funding goal low. If I make any money, it’ll be from selling the game commercially.
I’ve already written up an alpha version of the demo, which is about 20 minutes long. The demo uses placeholder art and music (from Persona and various YouTube artists, respectively), but most of the text and mechanics are there.
Here’s some screenshots of the demo:
Welcome back to my series on my overhaul of the Game of Thrones Board Game, which I have graced with the name A Board Game of Thrones: A Game of Thrones Board Game (or “ABGoT: AGoTBG”), because if there’s one thing George R. R. Martin is known for, it’s brevity.
In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about how I structured the game’s turns, my initial ideas for Scheme Cards, the Battle Phase, and the conscription mechanic, all of which are big departures from the base game.
Everyone’s favorite part of learning board games is the multiple steps (or phases) of the Game Round!
My first introduction to phases in a tabletop game was Magic: the Gathering, and honestly, this game is pretty similar: there’s an Upkeep phase, an End phase, a Combat phase, and two Action phase, one before combat and one after. However, two new additions to that formula are the Negotiation and Initiative Phases. Here’s the full list of Phases:
I found during playtesting of the game that each of the Phases ended up provoking different player behaviors:
During playtesting, I also found that two major issues with these Phases:
When designing the game, I found that I really did need an End and Upkeep Phase for keeping track of the game’s mechanics, especially Conscription.
Conscription became one of the key new mechanics in the game. In a nutshell, conscription allows players to create Units of soldiers from their territories. Creating these Units requires 200 Gold and 100 Steel, and supporting these Units each Upkeep Phase takes 200 Food.
To conscript a Unit, players must choose a territory to conscript from. Each territory has a Population number, which denotes how many Units can be conscripted there (most territories can only conscript 1 Unit). The combined Population number of a player’s territories represents how many total Units they can conscript.
After conscripting a Unit from a territory during the Second Action Phase, the player must put a Conscription Token on that territory. Conscription tokens stay on those territories for two turns, and until they’re removed, no more Units can be conscripted from that territory.
Conscription is a particularly crucial piece of games design because it shows how time and space can effect a game immensely.
The reason timing is important is because players cannot create Units of soldiers before the Battle Phase of a Round–they have to wait until the Second Action Phase. Why is this important? Two big reasons:
Here’s a quick example of play:
Alex creates 3 Units of soldiers during his Second Action Phase on Turn 1. Joe creates 2 Units of soldiers. Neither of them can fight with their Units this Game Round because the Battle Phase has passed, but they will be able to do so next turn.
During the Army Mobilization Phase of Turn 2, Alex moves his Units onto one of Joe’s territories. Joe, seeing this, moves his Units onto the same territory to defend it.
During the Battle Phase of Turn 2, Alex has a Battle with Joe. All of Alex’s Units are destroyed, while Joe has 1 surviving Unit. During the Second Action Phase, Alex decides to create 2 Units to replace the ones he’s lost.
During the Upkeep Phase of Turn 3, all players (including Alex) must pay for the Upkeep on their Units, which is 200 Food per Unit. Alex pays his Upkeep (400 Food) and is ready to fight in another Battle.
Another reason time is important is because those Conscription Tokens take two rounds to be removed. This means those territories are essentially inert for an entire Round. Because players prefer to conscript Units from territories that are the closest to the where they want to go (the easternmost edge of the Kingdom, for example), players will conscript from nearby territories first. This ensures that they can carry out their plans immediately.
However, this is where space comes in: players must conscript Units from more distant territories during the next subsequent turn if they want to reinforce their first Units. Because of how the map is laid out, this can cause problems: Units can only move 3 spaces during a Game Round, and most Kingdoms consist of 4-5 territories.
If a player isn’t careful, their second round of reinforcements may not be able to make it to where their previous Units were, or where they’re needed most. This is especially true if a player is controlling two disparate Kingdoms, like Dorne and the Riverlands.
Together, time and space place limits on how quickly players can react to one another and carry out their plans. With only 10 Rounds, every delay can be game-changing.
I didn’t cover Battles and Scheme cards in this post like I’d hoped, but that’s because doing initial playtesting for the game brought up a whole new slew of ideas, issues, and design challenges. I’ll be writing up my full takeaways from the initial playtesting in the next post!
Some exciting news!
First off, I’ve been hired by Chris Van Der Linden, the founder of the third-party tabletop RPG publisher The LoreSmyth, to work (essentially) as his right-hand guy. I’ve been working on blog posts, social media, PR outreach, and overall strategy for the LoreSmyth for the past two weeks, and I’ll be running a D&D game at Aethercon this year using the company’s original campaign setting, “Savage Dawn.”
Second, I’ve signed a contract with Fable Labs, a company that serves as a publisher for independent interactive stories (via an app called “Tales”), to work on one of their internal story ideas. I’ve been signed on to write a 26-“episode” series, starting with a three-episode pilot! I can’t disclose more than that, but the story is right up my alley.
Third, I’ve started up my second D&D Legends group at Hex & Co, which means I have roughly 12 people who are paying a subscription to play with me in my custom-built world.
Between Hex & Co, the LoreSmyth, Tales, and other freelance and volunteer writing projects, my schedule has filled up pretty rapidly, which means I have to put some of my other projects on hold.
This means that Black Heaven: a Necromantic Dating Sim will be shelved for now, and I’ll only be working intermittently on A Board Game of Thrones: a Game of Thrones Board Game.
However, I’m still working on new fiction, and have at least two stories that have full drafts completed, including a new one about Yute and one about Ryu-Ito.
Welcome back to my ongoing series of posts on my game demo project “Black Heaven: a Necromantic Dating Sim”!
If you haven’t read part Part 1, go read that first, you animal.
This time, I’m talking about narrative—outlining the story, figuring out the characters, and writing the opening scene. Because Black Heaven is just a demo at this stage, there are only four scenes, each of which introduces the player to one of the key characters: the necromancer No-Eyes, the scholar Ru Okazi, the martial arts master Izagi Ito, and the conwoman Leathe. Still, putting together the demo meant having a general outline of the plot for the entire game, as well as in-depth outlines for the characters.
The first step in creating the game’s narrative was brainstorming the plot. After a few iterations on the general idea of collecting ghosts for a necromancer in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, I came up with this summary:
Five years ago, a devastating plague spread across the world, driving humanity into the long-abandoned subterranean ruins known as the Starving Kingdoms. As one of the few survivors, you’ve been living a lonely existence, haunted by memories of the world you knew…until a necromancer named No-Eyes offers you a deal: if you bring him the ghosts of three people, he will bind one of them to you for eternity. However, the others will be trapped in his grimoire forever.
This summary was eventually adapted into the game’s overall description, but first and foremost it was a clear, concise encapsulation of the game’s setting, plot and conflict. I split it into four parts:
Apart from the expected challenge of romancing one of the ghosts (Conflict A), I wanted there to be another conflict for the player to deal with, which was a moral dilemma that asked whether the player would sacrifice the souls of the other two ghosts they didn’t choose to romance (Conflict B). The moral implications of Conflict B eventually developed into a third secret, conflict, which I won’t go into detail here…
As for setting, I drew strong inspiration from the landscapes and worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne (the latter of which is also afflicted by a rampant plague). I liked the idea of exploring the ruins of a dark, subterranean city, and decided to set the game partly underground.
When it came to the worldbuilding aspects of the game, such as magic, metaphysics, and history, I drew on my own body of stories. One of the key elements I incorporated was “physiomancy,” the study of the human body with the goal of discovering a path to eternal life. The main character used to be a physiomancer, as were No-Eyes and Ru, and the study of immortality is woven into the origin of the plague that swept through the world.
Here are some of the visual references I used when imagining the world of the game (all are from the Dark Souls series or Bloodborne):
The first and most important character I figured out for the story was No-Eyes—he’s the primary “antagonist” and the person who gets the plot going. The player meets him while scavenging in a subterranean library, an encounter that serves as the intro to the game.
I decided to use a character profile format I’d picked up when I was interviewing at Gameloft, which included an occupation, personality, and key words. Here’s what No-Eyes’ character profile looked like:
NO-EYES
Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes, smooth, eyeless helmet, gloves, no exposed skin, tall, emaciated
Occupation: Necromancer
Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, outgoing, charismatic, highly intelligent, cynical, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends.
Key words: relaxed, conniving, cruel, humorous
The other character profiles followed this same format—you can read all of them in the Art Brief.
One of the things I learned during my creative writing courses is to set up “trios” of characters: trios allow a writer to flesh out characters by making their traits opposed to one another, which “bakes in” the potential for conflict and tension. For the demo, I decided to introduce a distinct trio of potential romance interests:
Each of these characters was designed to be easily and intuitively understood, but with a few hidden dimensions unique to each, which would come into play in their horror forms and relationships with the player.
Of course, there’s already an avalanche of articles, charts, and memes exploring the very well-established archetypes of female romantic interests in anime, like this one:
I’m not a huge fan of this kind of pigeonholing, but I do understand that most characters end up falling into archetypes. Ru, for example, resembles Yuri from DDLC: shy, bookish girl who’s nervous around other people. No-Eyes resembles an archetypal Mephistopheles or “manipulative bastard.”
If Joseph Campbell has taught me anything, it’s that archetypes are a part of writing. It’s not a bad thing that a character is recognizable or familiar, but a writer needs to make their own mark on them to make them unique.
After thinking about conversation trees and how I would structure player interactions with the characters, I decided to take inspiration from Mass Effect‘s Paragon and Renegade elements. However, instead of a dichotomous ‘hero’ or ‘rogue’ option for each conversation, I created a three-option system, where each choice falls into one of the following attitudes and appeals to certain characters:
The more the player chooses a certain type of option (such as “Gentle”), the higher the disposition of the corresponding characters. However, though Izagi responds positively to the Bold options because her character’s ‘archetype’ is fierce and brash, her personality is more complicated than that.
One key idea I took from my writing courses is that complex, believable characters are built on contradictions. When I was designing the character of Leathe, for example, I wanted her to take pride in her ability to manipulate people, emotionally and physically—as a conwoman, she sees it as part of her craft, as well as proof that she’s smarter than other people. The contradiction is this: Leathe ends up getting tired of pretending to be someone she’s not, but is too afraid of expressing herself genuinely, which is something she associates with vulnerability.
These contradictions are present in each character, and end up branching out into smaller traits that define the character’s personality. If you want to read more about how this kind of characterization is employed in games, check out my piece on Mass Effect 2‘s infamous fight between Jack and Miranda.
Before writing out the introductory scene for the game, I made a list of the things I needed to introduce or establish:
I decided to start with a horror-tinged dream sequence that introduced the plague and the player’s former relationship with Ru. Dream sequences aren’t exactly original, but done right, they can be surreal and horrifying, especially if the player isn’t sure if it’s the real opening of the game.
The dream is interrupted by an immediate threat: the player’s filter mask is clogged with ash and dust, suffocating them. From there, there’s some exposition and the player gets a chance to relax and take in the setting. Immediately after that, they encounter No-Eyes, who hasn’t seen them yet. The player must make a choice about how to approach him, which leads to the introduction to the three-path conversation system.
When I first started the Twine outline for Black Heaven, I wanted it to be as complex and non-linear as possible in order to give the player a lot of agency. Each of the little squares below represents a text passage, and each of the lines connecting them represents a connection between two different passages, with an arrow showing which direction the narrative is flowing. Depending on the choices a player makes, their narrative path will be different.
As you can see, the map below has a pretty small number of text passages, but has a whole lot of connections:
Here’s a closer view of the story map, which shows how complicated and multidirectional the narrative can get. You’ll also notice that a big branch in the narrative happens at one passage: “Get Up Intro”. This was meant to be one of the key choice moments in the scene, and would cause the player to branch into one of the three routes based on how they handled the initial meeting with No-Eyes.
Unfortunately, this structure caused some pretty significant problems. Because the conversation could go so many different ways (and even cross over into different ‘routes’), each passage in the narrative had to be somewhat modular so it could fit together in many possible combinations. Though this modularity meant the player could get to the same place through multiple routes, it also meant the flow of the interactions between No-Eyes and the player came across as abrupt and choppy.
This caused a realization: the more player choice you allow, the less control you have over the unified effect of the narrative. It’s much more manageable (and impactful) if choices are restricted to a few key moments, rather than try to offer a hundred ultimately minor options that sacrifice quality for the illusion of freedom.
After a few revisions, the story map looked like this:
Notice how clearly defined the three routes are (top, middle, and bottom, joining together about halfway to the right), how many fewer lines cross between the routes, and how few lines there are in general. Though “linear storytelling” is usually a dirty word among gamers, writing this short scene showed me that it’s especially useful in the beginning of a game, when the writer is trying to establish the setting, characters, and situation. Here’s a closer look at the story map:
Like with Part 1, this covers a very small part of the work that went into the narrative aspect of the game—instead of diving into the minutiae, I’ve tried to hit the highlights and big ideas.
In Part 3, I’m going to cover my first interactions with the Ren’Py engine, including learning how to use Python and set up a scene.
You can play through the Introduction scene for “Black Heaven” on itch.io using Twine now! Keep in mind, it’s still a work-in-progress.
I haven’t finished a novel in at least two years. It’s a pretty shameful thing for someone with a degree in Creative Writing. It’s even more shameful for someone who originally wanted to work in book publishing. Instead, I’ve been playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, VA-11 Hall A, and Mass Effect (among others).
I’ve written articles about the characters and narratives in those games, and after a long gestation period in my head, I decided to put together my own game. Or at least a demo of it.
That game is Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim. So far, it’s been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve worked on, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people once it’s complete. This series of articles is gonna talk about what it’s like putting it all together, from concept to (hopefully) final demo.
I don’t think that any creative person ever stops being a giant fanboy (or girl) for the people that inspired them, no matter how experienced or acclaimed they become. So I wanted to start off by talking about two fan letters I wrote to the creators of two games that really shaped this project.
A big part of my drive to create a visual novel game came from playing Doki Doki Literature Club, which won over fans and critics despite being one of the most disturbing, twisted games in recent memory. After I finished my first playthrough, I opened up a window in Gmail and wrote Dan Salvato a letter. Here’s an excerpt:
…I wanted to send you a letter saying how much…I’m not sure. It’s a terrible thing to say I “loved” a game about girls committing suicide. To be honest, I felt sick playing it–it felt like it was slowly picking apart my sanity in ways I believed nothing could…
When I was done, I felt like I was looking at the whole world in a new light. For me, DDLC reignited my passion for storytelling, for games, and for creating elaborate fantasy worlds where, as Yuri might say, you can lose yourself.
You can read my full thoughts on DDLC here, but that game wasn’t the only one that really inspired me.
As the internet legend goes, Katawa Shoujo started as a joke on 4chan that progressively became more and more serious. Forum members started pitching ideas for a dating sim, which ranged from disgusting to surprisingly thoughtful. Some committed posters got together and assembled the game in Ren’py, a free visual novel engine.
The game’s story revolves around the male protagonist’s transfer to a high school for handicapped youth after he suffers a heart attack, and from there, becomes an exploration of vulnerability, honesty, and empathy. After my first playthrough (Hanako’s Path), I wrote another letter, to one of the writers behind the game. Here’s an excerpt:
“…every now and then, I come across something that illuminate my life, whether it’s a song or a conversation with a friend. Katawa Shoujo was one of those things, and I’m so thankful that it exists. I hope that one day I can write something so well-crafted and devastatingly honest.”
What was so striking about these games was how engaging they were, despite having very limited animation and relatively little player interaction. Instead, the strength of the writing had to carry the game. As a writer myself, I wanted to create something that evoked the same feelings I had while playing these games.
I’m a big fan of necromancers. I wrote a whole post about designing a terrifying helmet for my necromancer character No-Eyes, who appears in this game. I also published a standalone short story about No-Eyes in the professional fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m fascinated by immortality, forbidden arts, and riding the line between being human and…something else. Horror really hooks me, and I wanted to weave that into the game.
I’m also a big fan of worldbuilding, to the point that nearly everything I write or create takes place in the same world. So when it came time to lay the groundwork for Black Heaven, I decided to set it in my shared world. Because of my love of DDLC and Katawa Shoujo, I decided to make the game a dating sim, but with a necromantic twist: you’d be romancing ghosts.
One of the guiding ideas of ghosts in my stories is that they’re shattered mirrors of who they used to be–the memories, traumas, and desires of their past warp and twist their mind, and their memories become muddled. This added an interesting dimension to the ghost characters: instead of just building a relationship with a ghost, you’d need to learn more about their past and psychology.
After several iterations on that theme, I came up with the central conflict: your character makes a deal with the necromancer No-Eyes to collect a list of ghosts from across a post-apocalyptic landscape and bring them to him. In return, you get to keep a ghost as a companion. However, as the game goes on, you realize that turning any of the ghosts over to No-Eyes may mean condemning them to an eternity of torment…
As soon as I had the central kernel of the plot and some rough sketches of where I wanted it to go, I started thinking about the project as a whole: what would the final product look like? How would it be framed to potential players? What would the guidelines be for the art? And what would be the game’s “pitch”?
I came up with a proposal document, written and outlined so that I could show it to possible collaborators to give them a quick, effective summary of the project. Mostly, though, it was meant to be an internal reference document: I’ve found that pretending to explain a project to a complete stranger can quickly solidify what the project is and what it should be, and the proposal did that. In essence, the doc galvanized the specifics of the game and gave me a clearer picture of what needed to be done.
In addition to the game’s description, I listed the art assets I needed for the project (such as character and background art), narrative content, character profiles, and marketing materials (such as a logo and cover art).
You can read the proposal here.
The proposal became my guide for the rest of the project, but I realized I needed to create separate docs to start outlining and designing the characters.
You can see the Art Brief for the demo (which includes Character Profiles) here.
I decided to sit down and sketch out backstories for each of the characters, covering their history, personalities, and key experiences, as well as their deaths. I boiled down these backstories into very short, succinct profiles for each of the characters, which listed key traits, physical descriptions, and a summary of their personality. After that, I found reference photos from real-life models to help get a clearer picture of their appearance and assist the artist in drawing character art.
Visual novels live or die based on their art and visuals, I wanted to make sure the art brief clearly expressed what I was going for. In the brief, I give some samples of the type of art style I envisioned for the game, as well as samples of character art from Katawa Shoujo. I also outlined how I wanted the concept art and design process to work.
Because of the visual novel format, each character would need at least three “portraits,” each of which would express a different emotion: happy, neutral, or sad.
In addition to their normal forms, I decided to give each ghost a “horror form,” which must be dealt with before sealing the ghost in the player’s grimoire. The idea was that the player must see beneath the horror form to find the person underneath, and then appeal to their humanity to convince (or force) them to enter the grimoire. Each horror form had its own description and set of reference photos, which were meant to guide their design.
Horror forms were partly inspired by the monsters in Silent Hill, which were designed to be expressions of the protagonist’s suppressed thoughts and feelings. Another influence was my reading into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which described the many layers of psychological hang-ups a soul must peel away before moving to its next reincarnated form.
I got in touch with Joel Clapp, an artist friend of mine, to discuss creating some of the concept art for the game. I sent him the art brief I’d put together, but soon after creating some sketches for me, he brought up an important and troubling question: how sexy should he draw them?
This led to a conversation about the morality of dating sims in general and how comfortable we were with creating a game in a genre where women are explicitly treated as sex objects. Here’s an excerpt from my email response to Joel:
“From the beginning, I’d planned on Black Heaven being a subversion of your normal dating sim, but as you point out, just because Doki Doki Literature Club is a subversion doesn’t mean it doesn’t exploit sexuality to attract players and implicitly promise them sexy times to get them to play—the characters still have accentuated breasts and curves, which were designed to attract people.
This brings up two questions:
In my mind, the answer to the first question is no. That’s not what attracts me about dating sims, and it’s not what I have planned. In my mind, this is gonna be a game about romance, but it’s not just gonna be about that—it’s about learning how to put yourself back together by helping others do the same, it’s about being honest with yourself and others, and it’s about choosing between your own selfish desires and what’s best for someone else. It’s not just a pretext for porn.
As to the second question, I think the answer is also no. Games like Katawa Shoujo prove that you can have a conventional dating sim, including sexuality and multiple romantic partners to choose from, and still tell a heart-wrenching story that does not boil down to you picking out a 2D sex doll. It is possible to creating a dating sim that uses romance and sexuality as part of a bigger, unified effect, and I think a lot of players are looking for something like that…
…I think, when designing these characters, we should stick to making them tastefully attractive, but with a greater focus on bring out their individual characters. It’s more important to make them memorable and distinct than making them sexy.”
This is a really short summary of the concept stage of the project, which went through a bunch of iterations and alterations. In Part 2, I’ll talk about the narrative design process, including drafting scenes and revising them in Twine.
